Some time after the Smolensk catastrophe a motley group of diehard conspiracy believers began holding monthly meetings (the 10th of each month) to commemorate the crash and make dark pronouncements about finding the truth behind the crash and generally be miserable together.
Even the ringleader, the leader of the ruling party and twin brother of the president killed in the crash is getting sick of them and has been walking back the idea of their necessity saying that he expects the one in April (8th anniversary of the crash) to be the last (I don’t think it will be, I think they’ll carry on by themselves).
Anyhoo, this month I happened (by accident) to see a few minutes of a service in church where various, mostly older, people gave short speeches about the lies and cover ups and how one day the truth will come out.
Braving the dark repressive forces of sanity to make a principled stand
I began to have a weird feeling of deja vu looking at the haggard, worried and furtive faces of those in the audience and suddenly I realized what it reminded me of – they looked very much like those taking part in church supported anti-government rallies in the early 1980s. The same mix of unease riding an adrenaline high was everywhere.
Then I realized why they can’t let go and of course I don’t think it has anything to do with the crash or those who lost their lives in it. They’re nostalgic for the threat of violent repression of the communist period. I’m sure that at the conscious level they don’t want some member of the ZOMO (extremely hated by everyone riot police) to burst in and start beating them or attacking them with water cannons… but they miss that fever high that came from speaking out when that _might_ happen.
Those were the days my friend, we’d fight and never win…
That doesn’t explain the younger people but they have a different adrenaline high – speaking out when they know most people aren’t taking them seriously and don’t hide their contempt. Most people in Poland find the Smolensk die hards to be some combination of ludicrous, pathetic or contemptible and speaking out boldly when everybody things you’re full of it probably provides its own reward.
People are simultaneously predictable and extremely odd in the lengths they will go to in order to get their next fix of whatever emotional drug they crave.
The Worked Shoot 
I wish the times back when conspiracy nutjobs were few and sexual abused victims of alien life forms.
Conspiracy theories were definitely cooler back before every Tom, Dick and Harry knew about all of them…
There is this joke Youtube channel that is funny because it does them ALL. So maybe it’s not all too bad.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDYC_WJ7dmcQypDGuGZImXA/videos
When I was in high school in the early ’80s I felt as though all the fun had been had by the kids in the late ’60s so I tried to imitate them to some extent. Maybe it’s like that with the younger people you mention. It seems to me that some of the kids in the US who think of themselves as “alt right” also have an image of themselves as being a new Woodstock Generation — and there are intimations of a sort of online Haight-Ashbury — but maybe I’m wrong about that.
The problem with that in Poland is young people know nothing about the communist period because it’s pretty much absent form the school curriculum (an effect of ongoing ideological warfare about who did and didn’t do what back then).